(Note: The following essay appeared as Mr. Reed’s regular "Ideas and Consequences" column in the July/August 2007 issue of The Freeman, the journal of the Foundation for Economic Education.)

In 1800, fewer than 1
million people lived in London; a century later, well over 6 million. As the
20th century dawned, London had already been the most populous city on the
planet for seven decades. Britain’s population as a whole soared from 8 million
in 1800 to 40 million in 1900. In the previous 2,000 years, even a fraction of
such population growth anywhere in Europe was usually nipped in the bud by
famine, disease, falling incomes and population retrenchment.

But Britain in the
19th century was a special place, the legendary "workshop of the world." London
had become the capital of capital, with private investment in agriculture and
manufacturing burgeoning at a record-breaking pace in the latter half of the
century. The year Victoria ascended to the throne, 1837, saw fewer than 300
patent applications for new inventions, but by the end of the century the number
exceeded 25,000 annually. Per capita income on the eve of World War I was three
times what it was a century before and life expectancy had risen by 25 percent.
There were many more mouths to feed and bodies to clothe, but British
entrepreneurship was feeding and clothing them better than the world had ever
experienced. It was the greatest flowering of problem-solving creativity,
ingenuity, and innovation in history.

Colin Pullinger, a
carpenter’s son from Selsea, typified the 19th century British entrepreneur. He
designed a "perpetual mousetrap" that could humanely catch a couple dozen mice
per trap in a single night, and then sold 2 million of them. Perhaps Emerson had
Pullinger in mind when he famously wrote, "If a man write a better book, preach
a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbour, tho’ he build
his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door."

As the 1800s drew to a
close, the framework that made possible these extraordinary achievements —
capitalism — fell under assault. As poverty declined massively for the first
time, the very presence of the poverty that remained prompted impatient calls
for forcible redistribution of wealth. Around the world, Marxists painted
capitalists as exploiters and monopolists. In Britain, Charles Kingsley argued
that Christianity demanded a socialist order, and the Fabian Society was formed
to help bring it about. Many unscrupulous businessmen turned to the state for
favors and protections unavailable to them in competitive markets. Would anyone
come to the defense of the capitalism with as much vigor and passion as those
who opposed it?

At least one group
did: the Liberty and Property Defence League. Though its work has been largely
forgotten, what the world learned about socialism in the following century
surely vindicates its message. Its name derived from the members’ belief that
liberty and property were inseparable and that unless successfully defended,
both could be swept away by the beguiling temptations of a coercive state.

The founder of the
League in 1882 was a pugnacious Scot by the name of Lord Elcho, later the 10th
earl of Wemyss as a member of the House of Lords and thereafter known simply as
"Wemyss." Originally elected to parliament in 1841 as a protectionist Tory, he
eventually embraced free trade and repeal of the Corn Laws by 1846. He later
evolved into a full-throated advocate for what we today would call "classical
liberal" ideas. At the organization’s third annual meeting in 1885, he expressed
his hope that its efforts to educate the public would "cause such a flood as
will sweep away, in the course of time, all attempts at state interference in
the business transactions of life in the case of every Briton of every class . .
. . No nation can prosper with undue state interference, and unless its people
are allowed to manage their own affairs in their own way . . . ."

Wemyss and his friends
rounded up spokespersons and financial support. They enlisted writers and public
speakers. They published and circulated essays and leaflets. The organization
operated as an activist think tank with a lobbying arm. The League attempted to
mobilize public opinion against specific bills, functioning as a "day-to-day
legislative watchdog" in the view of historian Edward Bristow. It even arranged
testimony before parliamentary hearings. One League pamphlet attacked the
introduction of "grandmotherly legislation" as a transgression against the
freedom of contract. Armed with arguments provided by League members and
sympathizers, Wemyss’ allies in Parliament killed hundreds of interventionist
bills in the 1880s and 1890s.

Opponents often
accused the League of being motivated by its members’ bottom line drive for
profits, but in actuality its philosophical ideals were paramount. Among its
members were some of the brightest intellects of the era, Herbert Spencer being
perhaps the most notable. Author of the libertarian classic, "The Man Versus the
State," Spencer was the best-selling philosopher of his day and was nominated
for a Nobel in literature. Spencer saw liberty as the absence of coercion and as
the most indispensable prerequisite for human progress. The ownership of
property was an individual right that could not be morally infringed unless an
individual first threatened the property of another. Spencer has been demonized
as an apostle of a heartless "survival of the fittest" Darwinism by those who
choose to ignore or distort his central message, namely that individual
self-improvement can accomplish more progress than political action. One creates
wealth, the other merely takes and reapportions it.

Auberon Herbert was a
Spencer acolyte whose championship of voluntarism found fertile soil among
fellow League members. His now century-old warning about the danger of state
intervention is positively prophetic: "No amount of
state education will make a really intelligent nation; no amount of Poor Laws
will place a nation above want; no amount of Factory Acts will make us better
parents . . . . To have our wants supplied from without by a huge state
machinery, to be regulated and inspected by great armies of officials, who are
themselves slaves to the system which they administer, will in the long run
teach us nothing, (and) will profit us nothing."

In a 1975 essay in
"The Historical Journal" from Cambridge University Press, historian Bristow
contended that the Liberty and Property Defence League changed the language in
one important, lasting way. Prior to the 1880s, "individualism" was a term of
opprobrium in most quarters, referring to "the atomism and selfishness of
liberal society." The League appropriated the word and elevated its general
meaning to one of respect for the rights and uniqueness of each person.

But was the League
successful in its mission to thwart the socialist impulse? In the short run,
lamentably, no. By 1914, socialists had convinced large numbers of Britons that
they could (and should) vote themselves a share of other people’s property. Two
world wars and a depression in between seemed to cement the socialists’ claim
that their vision for society was inevitable.

Good ideas, however,
have a way of resisting attempts to quash them. Bad ideas sooner or later fail
and teach a valuable lesson or two in the process. Britain and most of the world
gave socialism in all its varieties one hell of a run in the 20th century. The
disastrous results now widely acknowledged underscore the warnings of those who
said that we could depart from liberty and property only at our peril.

The warriors of the Liberty and Property Defence League may have lost the battle in their lifetimes, but a hundred years later they offer prophetic wisdom to those who will listen.

#####

Lawrence W. Reed is president of the Mackinac Center for
Public Policy, a research and education institute headquartered in Midland,
Mich. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided that
the author and the Center are properly cited.